Energy bill: Can lawmakers prove the skeptics wrong?

Washington, Sept. 13, 2016 - The first joint conference to
reconcile sharp differences between competing House and Senate energy
bills divided sharply along party lines. The division was glaring despite
optimistic forecasts from Senate Energy Committee Chair Lisa Murkowski,
R-Alaska, and others among the 47 conferees asked to list their priorities in
last week’s initial conference session.

Republicans called for a bill focused on accelerating U.S.
oil and natural gas production, use and exports. In contrast, Democrats said
that to avoid a presidential veto and have a bill signed into law this year,
the final legislation must prioritize transitioning from fossil fuels to clean
energy in order to address climate change.

Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., warned Democrats against
rejecting the House’s more partisan, more fossil-fuel-focused energy provisions
that he said he supports. “It is widely believed that there are some Democrats
in the Senate, as well as in the House, that are going to try to delay reaching
an agreement until after the election or perhaps until the next Congress,”
Barrasso said. But he warned that “if
some of the Democrats do not want to reach an agreement, I would just tell
them, do not assume that this opportunity or this offer will be available in
the next Congress.”

House Energy & Commerce Committee Chair Fred Upton,
R-Mich., opened the Sept. 8 conference on a positive note. He asked the
conferees to appoint Murkowski as the conference chair and said, “I look
forward to making progress with all of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle
in both the House and the Senate.” (List of
conferees)

Equally upbeat, Murkowski followed by saying that her goal
is “to prove the skeptics wrong” and “develop a final bill that can be signed
into law.” She promised to run the joint conference “in the same very open,
transparent, and bipartisan manner that allowed us to pass our Senate bill.”

Upton agreed, saying “We
do want to work together. We do want to prove the skeptics wrong.”

Commenting on the kickoff conference afterwards, Murkowski
said it was important to hear the comments from her colleagues in the House.
She also told reporters that regardless of when the Senate heads home to
campaign, “I’m going to take advantage of every single day that we have here
and push our staff, push members to be engaged and working on a product.”

Ed Krenik, senior principal for government affairs at
the Bracewelllaw firm in Washington,tells Agri-Pulse
that after nearly a decade without major energy legislation, the
House/Senate conference demonstrated “a shared goal” of resolving issues and
delivering a bipartisan energy bill to the president. Krenik’s colleague John
Lee, a director at Bracewell, adds that Republicans are working as hard as
possible to have a long-overdue energy bill signed this year because they’d
have to start from scratch next year and “the chances are that both sides will
be even further apart in the new Congress.”

But agreeing on an energy bill compromise won’t be easy. The
challenge was clear in comments from Rep. Frank Pallone of New Jersey, the top
Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. “While the bipartisan
Senate bill in my view could be much stronger in a number of areas, the House
version, which was the result of a highly partisan process, would unacceptably
increase energy use and costs to consumers and would undermine our nation’s
climate goals,” he said.

Pallone called for writing an energy bill that includes “three
essential components: infrastructure investment and modernization; direct
benefits for consumers, including programs that empower them to manage their
energy consumption and costs; and it must be consistent with our nation’s
climate goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

The first component he mentioned, infrastructure investment,
already has bipartisan support to include overdue measures such as modernizing
and hardening the electric grid. But he said that one grid modernization goal
should be to “support more distributed and renewable energy.” And Pallone’s
“benefits for consumers” priority is controversial since the Senate bill’s more
stringent energy efficiency provisions face Republican complaints that tightening
building codes would impose unnecessary costs.

Pallone’s most contentious demand is that any final bill “must
be consistent with our nation’s climate goals to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions” and that “Any modern energy policy must deal with climate change.”

“Certainly we have made progress with renewable energy and
efficiency, but there is much more that we can and must do to reduce our
overall energy use and to switch to cleaner energy sources,” Pallone said. Even
in this area, however, compromise may be possible. That’s because in promoting
House provisions to accelerate the approval process for new natural gas
pipelines and LNG (liquefied natural gas) export terminals, Republicans
emphasize that increased use of low-cost U.S. natural gas reduces greenhouse
gas emissions.

One example of using climate concerns to help justify
greater natural gas production and use comes from the American Petroleum Institute, the leading national
trade association for the oil and natural gas industry. In a letter
to House Speaker Paul Ryan and House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, API President
and CEO Jack Gerard wrote that API strongly supports House energy bill
provisions and pointed out that “independent reports show exporting U.S. LNG
will reduce global greenhouse gas emissions.”

So Democrats could end up accepting speedier approvals for
natural gas pipelines and LNG export terminals even though environmentalists
charge that building new infrastructure for fossil fuels will lock in their use
for another half century at the expense of developing more climate-friendly
renewable energy resources like wind and solar.

Yet if the energy bill conference reaches agreement on
increasing natural gas use, there will be other hurdles. Contested issues that
conferees raised in their kickoff meeting include:

·The Senate bill’s
proposed permanent authorization of the Land and Water Conservation Fund. Rep.
Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming and other Republicans voiced strong opposition. Along
with fellow Democrats, Rep. Raúl Grijalva of Arizona called permanent
authorization “essential to any bipartisan conference agreement.”

·The California
drought. Rep. Doris Matsui, D-Calif., warned that House drought provisions would
“damage the largest estuary on the West Cost” and “favor one region of our
state at expense of another.” Rep. Jared Huffman, another California Democrat,
called the House provisions “the same overreaching, anti-environment,
anti-salmon proposals” from years past and said they would “end a century of
federal deference to state water law.”

·The ethanol-promoting Renewable Fuel Standard. Rep.
Bill Flores, R-Texas, said it’s time for new energy policy that “recognizes our
abundant energy resources” and eliminates the RFS mandate which he said “fails
to deliver any measurable benefit to our climate or to our energy security.” ·

Despite such differences, Maria Cantwell of Washington, the
Senate Energy Committee’s top Democrat, concluded that “this country is
experiencing a very dramatic transformation in energy, and so we need to make
sure that we are updating the policies at the national level to help that
transformation continue to take place.” For her, the “transformation” must
include a greater role for renewables in the nation’s energy mix.

House Energy Committee Chair Upton stated the case
differently. “Many policies based on energy scarcity are simply no longer
appropriate, and efforts to expand the nation’s energy infrastructure have run
up against old permitting regimes that are not up to the task,” he explained.
So for Upton and other Republicans, the priority is unleashing the new oil and
natural gas resources made available through horizontal drilling and hydraulic
fracturing, or fracking – not transitioning away from fossil fuels toward
renewables.

This week’s guest on Open Mic is Ken Dallmier, President and COO of Clarkson Grain Company. While the global grain business is dominated by supply, demand and now trade wars, this Illinois-based company functions under a customer-focused mindset. Dallmier says this generation of consumer demand is dominated by a different set of social values leading to questions over the way food is produced and the prices they’re willing to pay. Sustainability, organic and non-GMO are providing farmers an income stream isolated from traditional market forces.

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The world of agriculture extends beyond what’s growing in your field or living in your barn, and here at Agri-Pulse, we understand that. We make it our duty to inform you of the most up-to-date agricultural and rural policy decisions being made in Washington D.C. and examine how they will affect you – the farmer, the lobbyist, the government employee, the educator, the consultant and the concerned citizen.